Poetry. "Don't believe Melissa Broder when she writes, 'I'm afraid / to say anything with heart.' This book is not afraid, as she proves right away and on every page, and that's why we needed her to make it. A little dark, a little damaged, a little deranged, but definitely not afraid--and never short on the titular organ, which also acts as mouth and mind. The whole book pumps, and I swear some of what's coming in and out are flashes of light that you can read it by."--Mark Bibbins "The speaker in MEAT HEART is either an old-world witch or a contemporary warlock. That is to say, this speaker-being gallops through time making thrilling observations. There is a focus on meat, blood and food.
The poems tear through the reader with a reassuring giggle, yet remain ominous. Broder writes, 'I find a thighbone in his mattress / and think of friends gone missing.' She also writes 'G-d loves my hair, ' so we are reminded not to be overly frightened. To read MEAT HEART is to consume, perish, murder, glitter, and prophesize. To say that Broder is fearless is not saying enough."--Natalie Lyalin "With her hallmark wit and brilliance, Melissa Broder has followed up her heralded WHEN YOU SAY ONE THING BUT MEAN YOUR MOTHER with MEAT HEART, a book of poems that is at once apocalyptic, full of sorrow, and packed with images crystalline in their beauty and truth. In these poems, Broder takes us through a world that is both alien and familiar to the world that we already know, a wild landscape where there is 'ash fish / and elemental octopi, ' where 'cornhusk filaments / Still jacket tongues, ' and where in a place with '200 flavors of panic / the worst is seeing with no eyes.' All of these freakish things to help us confront the bald fact that we are all just a series of meat hearts ourselves.
It is here that Broder shows her generosity as a poet, because she makes us a new world in these poems where we go beyond meat--a world where Broder tells us, 'Somewhere I stopped looking for magic.' I guess she found all she needed; this book is full of magic."--Dorothea Lasky.